We started with a lie-in! Lucca did attempt to get his breakfast served at 5.15am this morning (it's getting earlier!) but, much to our amazement, simply closing the bedroom door (which won't even shut properly - there was still a paw-sized gap) gave us another two hours of uninterrupted sleep! I did give in and go and feed the cats at 7.15am (at which point Lucca was starting to try to open the door by sticking his paw through the gap) as I figured that they had already waited longer than they would on a weekday, but they then allowed us to doze for another hour or so uninterrupted.
Once we were up, and after we had done some washing and got it on the line to start drying, it was time to get the 'pub' bikes out for their inaugural run into town. With mountain bikes we can even cycle along the stony, uneven drive, so it was a steep ride uphill to start us off, followed by the downhill-all-the-way run into Pescia. It felt great to be out on our bikes in the sunshine and I felt happy to be on a mountain bike.
When we reached the main square in Pescia we realised that, as it was the fourth Sunday of the month, the bric-a-brac market was on.
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| Bric-a-brac! |
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| The piazza looking colourful with all the Rioni flags. |
The bric-a-brac market turns out to be a rather more interesting affair than the regular Saturday market. We were incredulous at what some of the stalls were attempting to sell (old pairs of shoes, used linens, crockery - to be honest it made us think that we could have emptied the contents of the house when we first moved in and simply put it on a stall at the bric-a-brac market! - although of course we don't know how much of it actually sells). There were also some very dodgy-looking paintings, but also some stalls with some genuinely interesting-looking antiques - old cameras, old radios, old telephones, old tools and kitchen equipment, and even a guy who was selling large pieces of wooden furniture, amongst which was a really beautiful old solid wood work bench, complete with wooden vices. It made us think that it would certainly be worth a browse every now and then to see if anything really interesting ever comes up.
After a walk up and down the market, we set up camp at a table outside Bar Poulter with two cappucinos and two slices of the most delicious torta crema and sat back to watch the world go by.
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| Oh my. What a breakfast! |
We each had a further coffee after that, before deciding it was time to head back up the hill. Before we left we sprung ourselves upon a group of English-speaking guys we'd overheard at the table next to us - they had all arrived wheeling bikes and fully kitted out in Lycra. We were interested to find out what had brought them to this area on what was clearly a cycling holiday and it turned out that one of the group was born and bred here in the local area (his brother has a house in Vellano, while his sister lives near Montecatini), but now lives in Sheffield and runs a business organising cycling holidays in Tuscany. The other three in the group were Irishmen from the same cycling club. We spent a few minutes talking to them, and took a business card from the guy who runs the tours, then went on our way.
On our way back, we decided that rather than go all of the way along the road, we would attempt the rough road/path/lane that runs along the other side of the river as far as San Lorenzo. So we cycled over the river, along past the hospital, along past Chris and Sue's house, until we found the track. It was interesting seeing everything from a new perspective on the other side of the river, and discovering little nooks and crannies that we hadn't encountered before.
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| Happiness is a mountain bike... |
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| Lovely day for a bike ride! |
Once at San Lorenzo, we re-joined the main road and cycled towards Pietrabuona. So far, so good. We made a quick stop at Amanda's alimentari - both to buy a loaf of bread and to pay the €3.40 that we owed from yesterday's shopping when neither we nor Lara (who was serving at the time) had change for a €20 note.
Bread safely in the rucksack, we mounted our bikes for the final section of the journey home, knowing that this would be the hardest bit. Well, all I can say is that it felt like we burnt ALL of the calories of the torta crema just cycling the final 500m back to the house. The road is very steep, and with knobbly tyres, even the lowest gear doesn't help all that much. My approach to such things it to attack it as hard as I can in order to try and get it over and done with as quickly as possible, while Stuart prefers the slow burn approach. And so it was that I reached our driveway first, but on reaching the gates had to dismount and double over in an attempt to catch my breath! It wasn't until Stuart made it to the drive that I was starting to breath more normally again, but was still sweating by the bucketload. I think we were both a bit shocked at how hard we had found the final short, sharp ascent - but pledged that we will do it more often in order to make it start to seem easier!
All in all it had been a wonderful and thoroughly enjoyable morning.
We had decided over coffee that we would have a very quick lunch and then set out on a sightseeing trip slightly further afield this afternoon.
Over the past week or so, we have somehow ended up watching lots of war documentaries. We'd watched three excellent BBC dramas about WWI based on the accounts of real soldiers, as well as the programme we watched yesterday about the WWII soldier who had been interred as a PoW in Auschwitz. We've both held something of a fascination for WWII, and had been attempting to learn a bit more about Italy's involvement, and in particular about the Gothic Line - the Germans' last line of defence, which crossed Italy very close indeed to our valley.
By chance, I'd spotted a link on Twitter a few days ago to a page about the village of Sant Anna di Stazzema - the site of a horrendous Nazi massacre in 1944 and now part of a National Park of Peace. We decided that that was where we would head this afternoon.
Sant Anna di Stazzema is a good way further west of us, in the Appuane mountains pretty close to the sea. We headed towards the Autostrade and in the direction of Viareggio, then peeled off and headed into the mountains.
The 10km drive up to village is incredibly long and winding, with perilous-looking drops down the side of the mountains and the road surface very bumpy and potholed in places. Nevertheless, we kept following signs for 'Sant Anna' and eventually found ourselves in a large car park.
On the early morning of 12th August 1944, SS troupes approached the village from four different directions and systematically killed virtually all of its inhabitants - mainly elderly people, women and children - in an act of retaliation and intimidation against the civilians who had joined the significant partisan movement in the area. 560 people were massacred within the space of three hours in this tiny, quiet little isolated village in the mountains. Ironically, many of the people in the village at the time were people who had fled the larger towns and gone to this remote, seemingly inconspicuous place to seek refuge.
The first thing we saw on getting out of the car was a memorial to the youngest victim of the massacre. Tragically, a 20-day-old baby girl by the name of Anna Pardini.
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| Plaque commemorating actions that are simply incomprehensible. |
We made our way into the tiny village, which quite literally consists of a few houses and the church. The church and the piazza in front of it was the epicentre of the massacre, with the German soldiers using the pews from the church to light fires to burn the victims.
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| Such a tiny, peaceful little place. Hard to imagine what went on 70 years ago. |
There were memorials all around, but it still seemed incomprehensible that this peaceful little place had been the scene of such atrocity.
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| A peaceful mountain village. |
We then set out on a walk through the woods which leads to the large monument to the victims, standing high up on the hilltop.
Along the way we stopped to admire the simply stunning view - all the way down to the sea.
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| This gives you some idea of how far up in the mountains this remote little village is. |
The monument itself was imposing, sombre and serene all at the same time. The monument was erected as soon as four years after the massacre, in 1948. The remains of the victims, which had been buried in a mass grave in front of the church, were exhumed and brought to the monument as their final resting place:
The monument lists the names of many of the victims, although - despite covering two sides of an enormous plaque - many victims remained unidentified as they had been too badly burned. The plaque listed the ages of the victims as well as the names of those identified - it was so heartbreaking to see so many little children listed (2 months, 3 months, 3 years, 5 years, 7 years and so on), and so many large families all massacred together:
We then walked back down to the village and paid a visit to the museum. The museum had a couple of exhibits with English labels, but the vast majority was in Italian. Even with our smattering of Italian, it wasn't hard to translate the meaning though, and many of the photographs and exhibits on display in the museum gave us a much more vivid picture of the events that unfolded that terrible morning. We also stood and watched a film for a good 10 minutes, in which some of the survivors spoke (entirely in Italian) about their memories of the day. Although we couldn't understand most of what they were saying, the horror and sadness they were conveying was crystal clear, and we couldn't drag ourselves away until it had finished.
We eventually left the village feeling very moved and humbled and incredibly thankful for having been born into an age (and geographic region) of relative peace, stability and security.
Our drive back down the winding 10km of road afforded us some more stunning views:
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| Just stunning. |
By the time we were approaching Pescia, it was nearing 6pm - we really couldn't quite believe that it was still the same day as we had been cycling down the road into town for coffee and cake!
When we got in, we hit the terrace with a glass of beer to soak up the last of the evening's sunshine before heading in when the sun dipped behind the hill and the air turned a bit chilly. What a day!
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